I love how Kanye West and 50 Cent have structured this whole album-release-date competition as an election. There's a debate, grassroots campaigning and an unending amount of mudslinging from both sides. That speaks so much to their respective characters. I mean, seriously, what kind of person would effectively compare himself to a politician? I hate them both for wasting my fucking time: announcing "We're both assholes!" would have gotten the point across all the same.

The thing is, they are politicians. They're both power-binging for the sake of power-binging (because their unending lyrical braggadocio isn't going to change anyone's world but their own). Neither would ever take a stance that could hurt their respective futures (even Kanye's bravest moment, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," found him just stating the obvious). Neither would rock the boat musically, either -- Kanye's Graduation is more electronic than his past work (he calls it the "future of rap music," which means that rap is just catching up to Daft Punk circa '01 and/or the vintage-synth-having, Michael Jackson-sporting '80s. He's calling hip-hop retarded, OK?). 50's Curtis is occasionally softer than usual. Either side's new material isn't shocking or particularly fantastic. They'll both lie to your face (Kanye's done with MTV? 50's quitting when he inevitably loses this silly marketing scheme? Now they both just called you retarded.) These two men are slimy, slimy people who gleefully substitute savvy for conviction every chance they get. They have nothing to say except for that which has a chance of grabbing your attention. Choosing one would be like choosing the lesser of two evils. Of course, you could buy Ani DiFranco (here, Dennis Kucinich, obviously) or, I don't know, Kenny Chesney (who's...Christ...uh, Larry Craig?). Go ahead, throw your vote away.

At least this is an election that you can avoid entirely and sleep at night knowing that you didn't have some indirect hand in flushing the world down the toilet. Yeah, you'll end up living through the presence of 50 and Kanye, but you'd have to anyway if you pay attention to pop culture. The only thing that's going to come out of this is that one massive ego will expand -- the other (the loser's [50's]), will just stay where it is, as this will be such an easy thing to forget once it's over (it is, after all, based in pop music). My point is: you can't change things here. The rich get richer and louder and louder. You're powerless, and while I tend to think that this is true even in the grander scheme of things (democracy be damned), you can thank 50 and Kanye for reminding you of it all over again. See? I told you they were assholes.

I'm having a ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead moment, because after spending a week in the top spot of the Billboard Hot 100, Fergie's latest abomination, "Big Girls Don't Cry," falls to No. 3 on the latest chart. I would have preferred for this song to have fallen of the face of the earth, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

I'm not sure if I've ever hated a song as much as I hate this one, and if you consider the piss and vinegar that make up about 78 percent of my body, that's a pretty big claim. But I don't even think I'm exaggerating. Even in the context of the shittiest year for pop music that I can remember, this song's popularity is a travesty. It's slow ascent (19 weeks!) to the pole position of the Hot 100 runs counter to the current trend of songs shooting to No.1 thanks to iTunes sales boosts only to slide down almost as fast. For its tenacity, "Big Girls Don't Cry" could end up at No. 1 on Billboard's year-end chart. Fucking disgusting.

There are plenty of things that I don't like, but nonetheless understand the patronage of or participation in. Jack Black. Terrorism. Child abuse. Homemade crystal meth. Crocs. Sharp cheese. Shit, "Fergalicious," even. All of these things can be explained away (most of them by citing deep emotional disturbance -- especially the Crocs). That said, I believe that "Big Girls Don't Cry" is thus far the most unfathomable phenomenon I've ever encountered.

With "Big Girls Don't Cry," we reach the winter of Fergie's discontent, which just so happens to be her Hot AC crossover record after a career of Urban-format aspiring. It's so convenient that someone as personality deficient as Fergie should slide into the set-by-Stefani standard of pop eclecticism. "Cry" starts out all delicate, like an arpeggiated jingle for a butter commercial that spoils by the time it hits its first over-amplified chorus. Are those flies driving me crazy or is it the sound of Fergie's bombast? Wait, I know the answer, for at least you can shoe flies away. "Cry" is more tenacious than any insect I've encountered, though it has less intellect. Fergie blathers on about some guy that she can't be with but wants to, who, let's be real, probably can't fucking stand her anyway, only to hit that chorus: "I hope you know, I hope you know, that this has nothing to do with you." Uh, actually it does, you fucking twit, because you've more than established your subject by this point. Otherwise you wouldn't be saying "you" at all. Fergie's logic goes something like: "You, you you. This has nothing to do with you. You you you. Yooooooou. Clarity. Peace. Serenity." And you know, I'm barely exaggerating. She actually sings that string of three words twice in "Cry." Do y'all like relaxing music? Well, have I got a track for you! For an even more soothing experience, I suggest sticking the lit end of incense in your ears.

I hate "Cry" a lot because it's all talk, no action. Fergie needs to be by herself and centered. Fergie and her self have got some straightening out to do. Then go fucking do it. This, fundamentally, illustrates why we have problems with obesity and hate in America: because people would rather fucking bitch than get off their pee-stained asses.

And then there's the most terrible problem with the song: its anti-expression theme, which again, suits someone as bereft of things to say as Fergie is to a T. Actually, asshole, big girls do cry -- it's just that most big girls haven't had extensive Botox and/or plastic surgery to fix their methfaces, and thus still have full use of tear ducts. Big girls do cry and, more importantly, big girls can cry. And god damn it, even if big girls don't cry they sure do whine, don't they Fergie? I want to use that fucking blanket that children miss as a gag on her.

Ugh, and then there's that counterfeit bid for relatability when she's babbling at the end and references playing jacks and Uno and sharing "our secret world." Jacks? Uno? I played those! I'm just like her! Secret world? I live in one of those where this beautiful song is a paragon of expression.

But of course, I kid. It's not a secret world, it's our fucking world that this song is dominating and that makes me so, so sad. It's too early to say if Fergie is an epidemic or if she'll just amount to spilled milk. But either way: boo hoo.

"Raise your hands if you want to be on PerezHilton.com!" Fergie shouted, and dozens of tiny arms whipped upward. "Do you guys like reggae?" Fergie asked, before performing a tune about Mary Jane shoes that may well have been the worst reggae song I've ever heard. "Do you guys like rock?" Fergie asked, and then she covered "Barracuda" without mentioning that its creators, Heart, were from Seattle...She ended "Barracuda" by screeching, "Do you know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby! You're gonna diiiiiieeee!" So maybe I'm expecting a little too much here.

Dreamgirls spoilers follow. Not that they'd ruin anything for you if you understand the concept of connecting the dots. Or if you've merely heard of connecting the dots, but haven't yet tried it for yourself. Or even if you've not yet gotten to the chapter in your math book in which two and two are put together.

FOD might as well be changed to FOM for all the gay love Madonna receives for just showing up (which is all she does on the beyond-dull Confessions on a Dance Floor, a record so wooden it might as well contain the confessions of a dance floor, but more on that in a sec). What bothers me is not the acceptance, but the seeming blindness of many of the above-linked reviews and reports that comes with the acceptance: they lavish praise without bothering to explain why (the worst culprit is the yeah-yeah-yeah-whatever-of-course-of-course 'tude of the Queerty link -- so much for "useful information" and not feeding into stereotypes). To a large chunk of mostly white, mostly well-off, mostly youngish, mostly tech-savvy gay men, Madonna is great, duh, except for when she's absolutely unbearable (and many a homo still will defend American Life, a record so confused and ultimately stupid that it couldn't even manage to be lucidly hypocritical). The gay default musical taste is Madonna. She is the fail-safe choice, the aural equivalent of shopping at the Gap.

While there, keep in mind that on Wednesdays, we wear pink.

As someone who loves pop music, I can't exclude myself from those who have appreciated Madonna's output. Before 1996's Evita, in fact, I was a huge fan, but then, I was also a teenager. What eventually repelled me was her noxious mixture of triteness and arrogance, two things I wasn't equipped to take issue with or even be aware of at such a young age. When both came to a point most clearly ("I wanted to put a face on it," she said of Ray of Light's take on electronic music, as though people like Donna Summer, Bernard Sumner and Björk never existed or made videos or were somewhat iconic themselves), I'd had enough. What was liking her worth, anyway? She can't really sing (though it's reasonable that you could like her voice the way you like your culinarily untrained mother's cooking). She can't write. She's savvy and sometimes quick-witted, but rarely does she exhibit the kind of intellect she'd love for us to believe that she possesses. I don't care about dancing or mysticism or flashes of contrived modesty. Yes, she supports the gay community, and has forever, but must that come with the cost of punishment through having to endure babble? Despite her practical reservation on at least one rung of the gay gene's helix, Madonna has very little to offer me (in fact, her music that I still enjoy -- mostly that of her debut album, before she created her know-it-all/know-nothing persona -- I enjoy despite her).

The feminist in me applauds Madonna and recognizes her boldness as a pioneer in the mainstream discourse of women's sexuality; the fag in me turns up my nose at the bait she's dangling in front of me (oooh, dance music!). Not that the package is so attractive, anyway -- Confessions on a Dance Floor thumps and thumps but fails to blow the roof off this sucker with its maudlin, clanking and mushy production and default mode of tunelessness (Stuart Price, whose participation had me interested in this album in the first place, bows under the weight of Madonna's whip, no doubt). The notion that Madonna should do anything but turn out mindless dance music is absurd -- I mean, really, these are her confessions? In her lyrics, my friend Sal Cinquemani hears "cliches [turned] into pop slogans," but what I hear is someone who has virtually nothing to say, whose dry, somnambulist delivery (once the charisma-filled redemption to her technical shortcomings) bespeaks motions that are just being gone through because it's been two and a half years and it's time to make a new record. I hear a supposedly intelligent woman who, without a trace of irony, will pepper her lyrics with: "Love at first sight"; "You're not half the man you think you are"; "Save you words because you've gone too far"; "At the point of no return"; "Hearts that intertwine"; "I'm going down my own road"; "The only thing you can depend on is your family." I hear someone butchering the English language just so we can hear her voice.

That isn't generosity, you know.

But then, what can be expected from a woman whose idea of a poem goes like this:

I have a cageIt's called the stageWhen I'm let out I run about And sing and dance and sweat and yell I have so many tales to tell I like to push things to the edge And inch my way along the ledge I feel like God, I feel like shit The paradox, an even split It's just a job, I always say I should be grateful everyday Sometimes I think I just can't do it But I persist and I get through it And I console myself each night . . .

This poem is from her tour documentary I'm Going To Tell You a Secret, which I had prepared to tear apart in this very space before I saw it. Instead, though, I found the film oddly moving, despite being marred by an abundance of (live renditions of) her more recent music and her unfailing sense of entitlement. It was actually at this point in the film that I decided I wouldn't be recapping, as it just struck me as too sad and pathetic to laugh at publicly. I pitied her myopic view of poetry, her reliance on the most obvious of rhymes and her trusted cliches (we now know why the caged bird performs). It seems that there's a cage around not just her outer life, but her inner one as well, limiting self-expression that sometimes desperately wants out.

But after viewing the willfully nonobjective "criticism" that emerged in the wake of Confessions on a Dance Floor's Internet leak, I feel the need to expose just how easy it is to point out her creative deficiency. Andy Towle posted his review just a few hours after the album leaked. So quick and unquestioning is the piece that you get the feeling that the record could have sounded like anything any it would have elicited the same praise.

What bothers me the most about Andy's review and the many, many that have popped up in a row like smiling Stepford flowers, is that the vehicle for the gushing is what could be used to stop it: the Internet. One thing I've left out in my criticism of her is Madonna's frequent borrowing from the underground, something that doesn't bother me as much as it's come to bore me. See, at various points in time leading up to the dawn of the Internet's vitalness as a source of information, Madonna's flagrant cultural mining was actually useful in exposing Middle America to sights, sounds and, effectively, cultural experiences it never would bother to access, but more importantly, couldn't access. Technology, though, has come close to deeming this and her irrelevant (lest we're counting on Madonna's interpretive skills, and I hope that I've at least proved why I'm not). You can, for example, open up a P2P that will allow you to download hundreds of Italo disco tracks that "Hung Up" and "Forbidden Love" aspire to sounding like. You can go back with a click and listen to the French filter house that "Get Together" ganks (Andy correctly points to Stardust's "Music Sounds Better With You" as a reference point on that one, and just invoking that bit of musical sunshine is what makes "Get Together" work better than anything else on the record, by the way). Without having to blow off dusty vinyl, you can hear why "Future Lovers" is such a boneheaded effrontery to its infinitely richer sampled source, Donna Summer's "I Feel Love."

(It's important to note here that M.I.A., who similarly puts chutzpah before technique [more honestly than Madonna, even], seems to have the right idea for culturally mining, or as Simon Reynolds somewhat infamously put it, exhibiting "great taste in Other People's Music," as she dines out on cultures that have very little to do with the Internet/digital lifestyle. M.I.A.'s cultural reporting via using sounds like bhangra and favela funk in a pop context is, at the very least, a lot less obvious than the I'm-sure-paid-no-attention-to-electroclash ideal of Confessions.)

This is not to attack anyone's taste (certainly, as someone who's constantly looking for ideas to explore here and who's critical in nature, I benefit from and enjoy a difference of opinion), but to question it and to throw out a rare voice of dissent. Is it really a matter of taste, anyway? When unanimous, knee-jerk praise supersedes the notion of objectivity, we're looking at something that would be so easy to write off as groupthink if this collective obsession with Madonna didn't start in childhood for so many (what came first: Madonna or the gay?). That I don't devour the shit she flings at me doesn't make me better than my fellow homosexuals, probably just bitchier (certainly, there's a host of what you could call "gay music" that I love a lot, starting with house). And (here's my confession), I'm probably doing a bit of overcompensating in the face of all the unconditional love. I can't help it. Like Madge says herself, nobody's perfect.

1. What distresses me most about the upcoming "horror" film The Exorcism of Emily Rose is not its guaranteed sanitization via its PG-13 rating (though, I do want a masturbation scene, dammitt!!!). It's that this woman . . .

. . . is not Sarah Polley . . .

Even though she, y'know, totally is. I'm so confused. I'd say more about Notpolley (aka Jennifer Carpenter), but I don't really wanna stress her out more than she already is.

2. Here's the nutritional information of the VEGETARIAN burrito I've been getting from Chipotle at least once a week for the past five months:

Is it any wonder that McDonald's owns this place? If you frequent Chipotle (I don't anymore, thanks to this), go here to calculate your own info. Get your purging finger ready! (Thanks to Tom C. for the heads-up on the site.)

3. Happiness is hearing on commercials that Thursday's episode of Being Bobby Brown is the "season finale," not just the finale.

4. Some wisdom via 50 Cent's From Pieces to Weight, a memoir he clearly had too much of a hand in writing:

It's all about back to getting rich--or trying to do so. This is nothing new. You can find pretty much the same sentiments in all sorts of philosophies--Samurai codes and shit like that. If Confucius says it, it's wisdom. But when 50 Cent says it, he's being negative.

Yesterday, gossip Web site Jossip dished that the ill will stems from nasty remarks Madonna made about Carey in 1995, when Mariah was a chart-topping juggernaut and Madonna's popularity was waning. The site posted a video that MTV Europe dug up of Carey hitting back that same year, saying, "I really haven't paid attention to Madonna since like seventh or eighth grade, when she used to be popular."

Yeah, it was all Jossip's hard work. I had nothing to do with it (not that I don't appreciate Jossip's link and all...). Now my chance at stardom is ruined. RUINED.

In other news, Page Six won't give me love, but I've gotten PLENTY. OF. IT. at the Friends of Mariah Messageboard. And by love, of course, I mean hate. How dare I expose the eagerly exposed?!?